We recently found some ground Moroccan lamb at a local grocer, which put a bug in my ear to try this as part of a hamburger mix, as I usually use 100% ground beef. The result was mixed, but very interesting. The interesting part is the grilled spiced lamb created exactly the flavor I was expecting. The mixed part is how it was not mixed, as starting with ground beef and ground lamb made it hard to blend the two adequately without over handling the meat, and it seems clear that using different varieties in a ground meat situation would benefit from being ground together. In the end it turned out pretty much as I expected: I'll likely just stick to beef for the burgers, but I really want to find a use for that lamb... perhaps just as lamburgers.

Ah that's interesting about Dynamic Merchants... I've already swapped over so I'll see how it pans out. The greeting range seems good so far, I had something similar in Morrowind.

I've mostly used Nexus Mod Manager and Wrye Bash until now but just started getting some mods from the Steam Workshop. I noticed you have to redownload the mods from Steam every time if you use an external utility to reorder the mods! That's a killer for me with a 2Mb connection. My newly discovered tip of the day is to just favourite them rather than subscribe...

MisterBenn wrote on Apr 19, 2012, 20:12:nin I took you up on your recommendations of container names, NPC greeting range and also dynamic merchants as is sounds better than Economics of Skyrim...

First two worked great...I'm still not sure Dynamic was working correctly. The idea is, if you use a certain merchant, they should have more money the next time around. Because I picked up everything, I ended up using 3 merchants constantly (since each would run out of money), and while sometimes they had extra money, sometimes they didn't. I'm not sure if the point of the mod was to use a single merchant, and I was confusing the fuck out of it by using 3...

But Container Names is very handy, as I tend to want to examine everything...except the damn food ones.

If there's time for a couple more suggestions, here are my current favourites:

1) Skyrim Creatures Alive (wilderness spawns are reworked. High level creatures are rare but possible at any level so you are genuinely taking a risk to go out wandering at low levels.

2) Realistic Lighting with Customisation - an overall weather and lighting mod with options to set the nights and dungeons super dark if you like that. Natural skies at all times of day and no performance impact from the method they use.

3) If you like hunger/thirst mods, Imp's More Complex Needs is superb. You'll need to think about your eat/drink/sleep as you go adventuring, great if you like to take your time and really get into it!

As mentioned, SkyUI is the absolute must. Your life will be a lot easier if you use the Nexus Mod Manager to install your mods.

Yeah, seems heretical but personally I found the controller to be a lot better for Skyrim at everything except archery. I was really sceptical but tried it and immediately found it very clearly better.

I have the compact hideout now, basically so there's one loot/materials/etc stash connected to all the houses, though I got that late on when I was just tidying up the missions.

Most of the mods seem to be minor graphical improvements with a risk of them changing the "artistic integrity" or whatever so I didn't bother. The HD texture pack is worth it but the other stuff didn't seem quite worth the hassle.

As for SkyUI, everyone using KB+M says it's a must, but using the MS controller it's not necessary. Yeah, seems heretical but personally I found the controller to be a lot better for Skyrim at everything except archery. I was really sceptical but tried it and immediately found it very clearly better.